CHAPTER 14: CREATING COLLABORATIVE PARTNERSHIP

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS, AND ALLIANCES

• Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to:

-undertake new initiatives

-address both minor and major problems

-capitalize on significant opportunities

Organizations create teams, partnerships and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations.

• Collaborating system - supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information.

• Organizations form alliances and partnerships with other organizations based on their core competency

- Core competency – an organization’s key strength, a business function that it does better than any of its competitors

- Core competency strategy – organization chooses to focus specifically on its core competency and forms partnerships with other organizations to handle nonstrategic business processes

•  Information technology can make a business partnership easier to establish and manage

- Information partnership – occurs when two or more organizations cooperate by integrating their IT systems, thereby providing customers with the best of what each can offer

• The Internet has dramatically increased the ease and availability for IT-enabled organizational alliances and partnerships

COLLABORATION SYSTEMS

Collaboration solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings, deploying applications, and remote project and sales management

•   Collaboration system – an

-  IT-based set of tools that supports

-  the work of teams by facilitating

-  the sharing and flow of information

•   Two categories of collaboration

(i)  Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration) - includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, and e-mail

(ii)  Structured collaboration (process collaboration) - involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hardcoded as rules

• Collaboration systems include:

(i) Knowledge management system
(ii) Content management system
(iii) Workflow management system
(iv) Groupware management system

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

• Knowledge management (KM) – involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving and sharing information assets in a way that provides context for effective decisions and actions
• Knowledge management system – supports the capturing and use of an organization’s “know-how”

EXPLICIT AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE

•   Intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into two categories;

1.       Explicit knowledge – consists of anything that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of IT

2.       Tacit knowledge – knowledge contained in people’s heads

•   The following are two best practices for transferring or recreating tacit knowledge

1.       Shadowing – less experienced staff observe more experienced staff to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach their work

2.       Joint problem solving – a novice and expert work together on a project

CONTENT MANAGEMENT

•   Content management system (CMS) – provides tools to manage the creation, storage, editing and publication of information in a collaborative environment
•   CMS marketplace includes;

(i)  Document management system (DMS)

(ii)  Digital assets management system (DAM)

(iii)  Web content management system (WCM)

WORKING WIKIS

•   Wikis – web-based tools that make it easy for users to add, remove, and change online content
•   Business wikis – collaborative web pages that allows users to edit documents, share ideas or monitor the status of a project

WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

•   Work activities can be performed in series or in parallel that involves people and automated computer systems
•   Workflow – defines all the steps or business rules, from beginning to end, required for a business process
•   Workflow management system – facilitates the automation and management of business processes and controls the movement of work through the business process
•   Messaging-based workflow system – sends work assignments through an email system
•   Database-based workflow system – stores documents in a central location and automatically asks the team members to access the document when it is their turn to edit the document

GROUPWARE SYSTEMS

Groupware technologies

 

•   Groupware – software that supports teams interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling and videoconferencing

 

WEB CONFERENCING

•   Web conferencing – blends audio, video and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected website

 

VIDEOCONFERENCING

•   Video conference – A set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously

 

 INSTANT MESSAGING

•   Email is the dominant form of collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new communication dynamic
•   Instant messaging – types of communications service that enables someone to create a kind of private chat room with another individual to communicate in real-time over the internet
•   Instant messaging application 

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